Women’s Roles Theme Analysis

One afternoon she took her finished work to the loft on Stanton Street. The owner invited her into his office. He looked at the piece goods carefully and said she had done well. He counted out the money, adding a dollar more than she deserved. This he explained was because she was such a good-looking woman. He smiled. He touched Mameh’s breast. Mameh fled, taking the dollar. The next time the same thing happened. She told Tateh she was doing more work. She became accustomed to the hands of her employer. One day with two weeks’ rent due, she let the man have his way on a cutting table. He kissed her face and tasted the salt of her tears.

One week later he took the girl down to the railroad station. She was in a contingent of two hundred going to Philadelphia. She was wearing a new cloak and a hat that kept her ears warm. He kept stealing glances at her. She was beautiful. She had a naturally regal posture. She was enjoying her new clothes. He was casual with her and tried not to be hurt. She had accepted the idea of leaving him without one word of protest. Of course, this was good for all concerned. But if she found it so easy, what would the future bring? She attracted people. […] Tateh was proud, but frightened too.

So then Frick was able to get the government working for him and the state militia came in to surround the workers. At this point Berkman and I decided on our attentat. We would give the beleaguered workers heart. We would revolutionize their struggle. We would kill Frick. But we were in New York and we had no money. We needed money for a railroad ticket and a gun. And that’s when I put on embroidered underwear and walked 14th street. An old man gave me ten dollars and told me to go home. I borrowed the rest. But I would have done it if I had to. It was for the attentat. It was for Berkman and revolution.

So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She cancelled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in the parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband’s absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. the Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened.

They were not discreet in their intercourse. They cohabited without even undressing, through vents in their furs, and they went at it with grunts and shouts of fierce joy. One day Father came upon a couple and was shocked to see the wife thrusting her hips upwards to the thrusts of her husband. An uncanny animal song came from her throat. This was something he could not write in his journal except in a kind of code. The woman was actually pushing back. It stunned him that she could react this way. This filthy toothless Esquimo woman with the flat brow and the eyes pressed upwards by her cheekbones, singing her song and pushing back. He thought of Mother’s fastidiousness, her grooming and her intelligence, and found himself resenting this primitive woman’s claim to the gender.

Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would life themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But she now no longer waited for it. […] she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied he infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.